In Time Flies, life is meaningless, do what you can before death takes you

polygon.com:

One of the weirder games revealed during this year’s Summer Game Fest was undoubtedly Time Flies. On its surface, it appears to be a modest time-management game where you explore a house and try to complete as many goals as you can before dying. Each run lasts between one and two minutes.

But the reveal trailer’s whimsical music belied the nihilistic tagline that appears at the end like a mic being dropped: “You are a fly. Your life is short. Make the best of the time you have. Because we are all going to die.”

“I was interested in having a fly as being something meaningless, almost annoying,” Swiss designer and animator Michael Frei, one half of the game’s development team (along with programmer Raphaël Munoz), told me. “And to do to do something meaningful as a fly in the world with a bucket list […] I think that’s something we ask ourselves every day, like, ‘What is meaningful to me? What should I do with my life?’”

In Time Flies, you take control of a fly in a minimalistically drawn world that, in the demo we played, consisted of several rooms in a house or apartment. As you explore each room, opportunities arise to check items off the fly’s bucket list, while trying to avoid an abrupt ending to the critter’s already brief life. The fly dreams of getting drunk before it dies; dive headfirst into the waiting wine glass and you drown, but alight next to the droplet on the table next to it, and your list becomes one item shorter. Exploring the house while finding the correct points of interactivity creates a simplistic but fun gameplay loop that will no doubt inspire players to seek out the fastest routes to complete as many objectives as possible in a single life.

Frei said that’s one way to play, although just as in